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Thursday, June 26, 2014

Obvious Child

Review
by Bob Ignizio

In
Judd Apatow's KNOCKED UP,
two characters who barely know each other get drunk and have sex
without protection, resulting in an unplanned pregnancy. These
characters are both adults, and given everything else we see about
them, probably at least a little to the left of center. And yet, when
discussing how to deal with this situation, they can't even bring
themselves to say the word “abortion” (they refer to it by the
euphemism “shmashmortion”), never mind actually discussing the
possibility of having one. This frankly came across asn unrealistic
to many viewers, and some accused Apatow of playing it safe so as
not to offend any pro-life audience members.That certainly can't be said of OBVIOUS CHILD.

Something
of a rebutall to Apatow's film, writer/director Gillian Robespierre's
OBVIOUS CHILD starts
with a similar premise. Stand-up comedian Donna Stern (Jenny Slate)
has just been dumped by her boyfriend and lost her job. This leads to
a night of heavy drinking and, eventually, unprotected sex with a Max
(Jake Lacy), a guy she has just met. Like Apatow's film it's a romantic comedy with a lot of crass, raunchy humor, but the similarities pretty much end
there.

Rather than treating abortion as something so taboo its
very name cannot be uttered, Robespierre makes it the central focus
of her film. One
might think that a romantic comedy about abortion would be something
of an oxymoron, but OBVIOUS CHILD pulls it off. Sometimes the jokes Donna cracks might seem a bit
flippant, but given that the character is a stand-up comedian it
makes sense that humor would be her way of dealing with her difficult
situation. As for the romance between Donna and Max, we've certainly seen less likely couples in rom-coms.

This
is Robespierre's first feature film, an expansion of an earlier short of the same name (also starring Slate) she made in 2009. There's
not much to her style as a director that really stands out, but for a
low budget film that spends most of its time having its characters
talk to each other, that's not really an issue. A short scene with David Cross seems a bit
unnecessary, and the film perhaps relies a bit too much on Donna's
job as a comedian to get its jokes in, but overall it's an
entertaining first feature that manages to tackle a tricky issue in an entertaining way. Those who are firmly on the pro-life side
of the abortion debate will likely beg to differ, but that kind of
goes without saying. 3 out of 4 stars.